Commemoration of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 in Ireland at the Turn of the 17th and 18th Centuries

The seventeenth century saw the establishment of a new kind of commemorative practice in England and its composites, the government-approved thanksgiving. The prayer service for the 5th of November was first established as early as 1606 to commemorate deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot. Similarly, in 1662 Ireland instituted a 23rd of October thanksgiving to commemorate the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The primary aim of this thanksgiving was to construct a cultural memory of the Rebellion and the involvement of Irish Catholics in it; the sermons delivered during these commemorations established a foundational narrative of the past. By representing the Irish Rebellion and the Irish Catholics in different ways, the government found an effective means of justifying its policies towards Irish Catholics in the present. Consequently, the prayers held on 23rd of October were actively employed to support specific policy objectives, leading to significant variations among them. In the 1690s, the highly negative representation of the Irish was defined by the recent Williamite War in Ireland, as well as the desire to justify the Penal laws. The sermons of the 1690s borrow significantly from John Temple’s “The Irish Rebellion” of 1646, a work heavily influenced by Foxe's Book of Martyrs. In “The Irish Rebellion” the Irish Catholics play the role of inhumane tormentors of Anglo-Irish Protestants, who in turn are portrayed as martyrs. In the next decade, however, indignation and discrimination gave place to conciliation and reformation. Putting aside the hate-mongering account of Temple, the sermons now relied on texts of Edmund Spenser and John Davies — namely, “A view of the present state of Ireland” (1596) and “Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued” (1612). Like these two works, sermons of the 1700s portrayed the Irish as violent but not inherently evil barbarians, perfectly capable of converting to civilization if their customs and religion were reformed.